The New Antaro Perfect Binder is Perfect for the Run Size of Cartim

Front Cutting Unit FA 650 and Book Data Center – in its new Antaro perfect binding line has two additional features compared to its predecessor, the Acoro model. These new features open up new customer segments and significantly reduce setup times thanks to automatic job data input.
 
For two decades, a perfect binder Acoro A5 provided reliable service at the full-service printing company Cartim, whose printed products are 95 percent offset. However, because it was getting on in years, the 34-year-old company, which traces its origins back to a one-man business established in a small 14-square-meter garage in 1991 and which has had two 4,000-square-meter production halls since 2006, replaced it with an Antaro just under a year ago. This made Cartim the first company in the world to use the innovative Muller Martini perfect binder.
 
Strengthening its market position
Cartim's Antaro is equipped not only with a long 3684 gathering machine with a total of 24 stations and an ASIR PRO camera system, which not only allows Cartim to bind quite thick books without pre-gathering but also to achieve significantly higher production reliability, but also a FA 650 front cutting unit. “Now we can,” says Frederik Reyntjens, “also offer our customers softcover products with cover flaps and also produce them in a single pass. This has strengthened our position in the market.”
 
In addition to the FA 650, the Cartim co-CEO is also impressed by the Book Data Center (BDC), which automatically enters job data into the perfect binding line. “This not only enables us to change over the Antaro much faster, but also means that we have significantly fewer manual interventions and thus fewer errors.”
 
For short and long runs
The fact that Cartim's choice for the Acoro successor, with the Antaro currently still running in two shifts – with three shifts as the long-term goal – was once again a perfect binder model from Muller Martini, has a lot to do with its flexibility. This is because it is designed for both short and long runs, making it perfect for Cartim's run length segment. This lies between 150 and 100,000 copies per title – with an average of 1,500 copies.
 
In addition, there is another Antaro highlight. It has a continuously running swing clamp system. The book blocks are transported in horizontally on their spines and are reliably transferred to the always fully open clamps.

 

Watch this video to find out how the new Antaro Cartim perfect binder can help you in your daily work.

Standardized job processes minimize sources of error
In addition to books, Cartim, with its 45 employees – three shifts on weekdays, one to two shifts on weekends – also prints magazines, brochures and catalogs in the softcover segment, which accounts for around 40 percent of the company's volume (versus 60 percent saddle stitching). The customers, who are mainly from the three Benelux countries of Belgium, the Netherlands and Luxembourg, as well as France, come exclusively from the B2B sector. They also include other offset and digital printers.
 
Many of them are regular customers who deliver their orders to Cartim mainly via an e-commerce platform. “This standardized process minimizes sources of error and helps us achieve a much faster workflow,” says Frederik Reyntjens. However, it also includes partner print shops that Cartim helps out when they have a machine problem or (too) many orders.
 
Two-stage training
The training of the machine operators also played a significant role in the smooth start-up of the 4,000 cycles per hour Antaro. This was divided into two parts. After the initial instructions, the two operators worked independently on the binder for a few weeks before the Muller Martini service experts visited Cartim again. This enabled them to exchange experiences in a partnership-based manner.
 
Read more about the Antaro perfect binder and its “twin brother,” the Antaro Digital, in this article on the Muller Martini website